Lots of local business owners often come to me completely perplexed by the complexity of online marketing and SEO Toronto. Once you have a grip on what all the acronyms like SEO, PPC, SM, CTR and others stand for, now you need to figure out how to make all of them work for you. Like most local business owners in Toronto, you probably don’t have the time or inclination to learn how to do all of these and become an expert at them so you’ve decided to outsource them. However the next issue now has become do you go with a “do it all” service? Do you hire one company to tackle each aspect and hope they play nicely together? Or do you hire someone in house to take care of all of these different tasks and hope for the best? The purpose of this paper will be to break down how to handle this daunting situation we all face at one point and most importantly how to take care of efficiently.

Toronto SEO

This is perhaps you most important investment as a local business owner in Toronto. You know that you need to come up in organic results because if you’re not there you’re missing the most amount of qualified leads to your business. The fact is as much as Google tries to change around the layout of their search engine results and confuse people on what results are sponsored and which ones are the “real results” the bottom line is most people know an ad when they see it. Ads have a 76% lower CTR than organic results. Inherently people know they can’t trust ads or sponsored links as much as the organic results so they automatically opt to click on the organic and if you’re paying top dollar for PPC but don’t have a presence in organic, you’re losing out.

Toronto PPC Campaigns

PPC is the second most important aspect of your online marketing campaign for a plethora of reasons that we don’t have time to break down each one but we’ll cover the most important. First of all, SEO, no matter how reputable or honorable your efforts may be, are subject to the whim of Google. One day they might decide your website ain’t so great any more and slap you into oblivion. If you’re relying on SEO as your only source of online traffic you can get wiped out over night. Having a profitable PPC campaign running can help spread your eggs into different baskets. The next advantage to using PPC in your online marketing arsenal is that you can do a lot of testing with minimal effort. For example, some keywords could take you months upon months before you rank #1 for them in organic results, where as, with the right budget you could start getting clicks for them and see how they work out with your product or service literally over night. Last but not least, in today’s day and age you need multiple first page rankings in order to truly dominate your competition. There’s now four sponsored links above the local results which are above the organic results. You need to be in order of those sections in order to make sure your presence is truly felt and ignoring any which one of them can be a major mistake.

Social Media Marketing

While over 90% of searches start on Google, the vast majority of time spent online is on Social Media websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, Reddit, Instagram, SnapChat and the list goes on. The bottom line is that if you don’t have a presence on social media you’re dinosaur. Lots of consumers will look to find your company online and if they don’t find your presence or if they simply find tumbleweed on a page that hasn’t been updated in years, they’re going to move on. On the other hand if they like what they see and engage with your business on their favorite social media platform they are 200% more likely to use your services or buy your product. Now that’s proof in the pudding right there on why you should include social media in all of your online marketing plans.

How to integrate these different disciplines into one healthy campaign?

Your best bang for your buck is having one company that is small enough to be value orientated but large enough to have expertise in each of the above disciplines. Once you’ve found a company with these specialties and expertise, if it’s not in your budget immediately to begin with all three you should develop a plan that will allow you to grow into it. A good plan should be clear and accountable. By developing a plan that let’s you grow into it you’re also applying pressure to the digital media company you’re working with as next phase of growth is dependent on results and the bottom line. By aligning your goals in such a manner, you’re setting the both of you up for a win-win situation. With that being said, you need to make sure it is a win-win situation in the sense that you’re not trying to squeeze more results out of the same budget but rather that the budget and therefore their reward is increased when goals are met.